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Home > Magazines > BAR > November/December 1992

Excavating an Ancient Merchantman

The Ma’agan Micha’el shipwreck

By Elisha Linder

A chance discovery of a 2,400-year-old shipwreck off the coast of Kibbutz Ma’agan Micha’el, 20 miles south of Haifa, has been yielding a storehouse of new insights into ancient seafaring and the shipwright’s art. Thanks to recent geomorphological changes—fluctuations in the sea level, sediment movements and shifts in local faults—along Israel’s seacoast, investigators are discovering more and more submerged antiquities. 026 We may have discovered, at last, a ship of Phoenician origin sunk along Israel’s Mediterranean coast almost 2,400 years ago. But the fact that after three seasons of excavation followed by intensive studies we still can’t be sure […]

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Footnotes

1.

See Shelley Wachsmann, “The Galilee Boat—2,000-Year-Old Hull Recovered Intact,” BAR 14:05.

2.

Maureen F. Kaplan, “Using Neutron Activation Analysis to Establish the Provenance of Pottery,” BAR 02:01.

Endnotes

1.

See Jay Rosloff, “A One-Armed Anchor of c. 400 B.C. from the Ma’agan Michael Vessel, Israel. A Preliminary Report,” International Journal of Nautical Archaeology, vol. 20, no. 3 (1991), pp. 223–226.

2.

See J. Richard Steffy, “The Kyrenia Ship: An Interim Report on its Hull Construction,” American Journal of Archaeology, vol. 89, no. 1 (1985), pp. 71–101.